In this chapter, Barthes raises the following questions: 1- How does meaning get into the image? 2- Where does it end? 3- (And if it ends,) [W]hat is there beyond? To answer these questions, he focuses on advertisement image because "in advertising the signification of the image is undoubtedly intentional" (Barthes 1977, 152).

He analyzes a Panzai advertisement, which includes "some packets of pasta, a tin, a sachet, some tomaotoes, onions, peppers, a mushroom, all emerging from a half-open string bag, in yellows and greens on a red background" (Barthes 1977, 153)".

"[T]he photograph analyzed offers us three messages: a linguistic message,a coded iconic message,and a non-coded iconic message" (Barthes 1977, 154).

The signified, according to Barthes, has 2 levels of meaning: the denotational and the connotational. The denotation is the literal meaning of the sign or the word. Whereas, the connotation is the interpretative association that this sign or this word gives, and it is culturally and context dependent.

"the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance" (Barthes 1977, 156).

Signifier: the most basic or literal meaning
Signified: the concept that a signifier refers to
Denotation: the most basic or literal meaning of a sign. For example: "rose" signifies a particular kind of flower.
Connotation: the secondary, cultural meanings of signs. Signs that are used as signifiers for a secondary meaning. For example: a "rose" signifies passion.
"[S]ignifiers will be called connotators and the set of connotators a rhetorics, rhetoric thus appearing as the signifying aspect of ideology (Barthes 1977, 161).

Linguistic message (is twofold: denotational and connotatial): the caption (Barthes 1977, 153)
"the literal image is denoted and the symbolic image connoted" (Barthes 1977, 155). Denotative (the denoted image / message without code): "Panzani" (Barthes 1977, 158)
Connotative (the signified message): "Italianicity" (Barthes 1977, 153)
"Man's interventions in the photograph (framing, distance,lighting, focus,speed) all effectively belong to the plane of connotation; it is as though in the beginning (even if utopian) there were a brute photograph (frontal and clear) on which man would then lay out, with the aid of various techniques,the signs drawn from a cultural code" (Barthes 1977, 158). Acts as the "anchor"